High-resolution tropical rain-forest canopy climate data

Canopy habitats challenge researchers with their intrinsically difficult
access. The current scarcity of climatic data from forest canopies limits
our understanding of the conditions and environmental variability of these
diverse and dynamic habitats. We present 307 days of climate records
collected between 2019 and 2020 in the tropical rainforest canopy of the
Yasuní National Park, Ecuador. We monitored climate with a 10-minute
temporal resolution in the middle crowns of eight canopy trees. The
distance between canopy climate stations ranged from 700 m to 10 km. Apart
from air temperature, relative humidity, leaf wetness, and
photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), measured in each canopy climate
station, global radiation, rainfall, and wind speed were measured in
different subsets of them. We processed the eight data series to omit
erroneous records resulting from sensor failures or lack of the
solar-based power supply. In addition to the eight original data series,
we present three derived data series, two aggregating canopy climate for
valleys or for ridges (from four stations each), and one overall average
(from the eight stations). This last derived data series contains 306
days, while the shortest of the original data series covers 22 days and
the longest 296 days. In addition to the data, two open-source tools,
developed in RStudio, are presented that facilitate data visualization (a
dashboard) and data exploration (a filtering app) of the original and
aggregated records.